What's the craziest true story you've ever heard of? There are some wild ones, like anything involving either Nikola Tesla or Evariste Galois or Chuck Yeager.
Or Ernie Shackleton.
This book I bought somewhere after hearing about the story. I think I asked for it for Decemberween one year also, and I think I actually have two copies at the apartment. I think this copy has a font that's easier on my eyes.
Okay, so the story: this book is the memoir and partial journal of Shackleton's ill-fated journey to the South Pole.
It was the time of the last great explorers, and as the North Pole had just been mobbed, the South Pole was next. Shackleton's team was in a race with another team, a second team that, as a SPOILER, actually beat Shackleton to the Pole. In fact, Shackleton never made the Pole. But that doesn't matter to the story; it's incidental.
The picture on the front of the book is from their first trial, when their vessel got caught, and then crushed, in the pack ice miles away from shore. The crew drug the supplies--including the twenty-foot-long lifeboats--600 miles across the floes. Six-hundred-miles. When they got to a rock formation called Elephant Island Shackleton took three of his strongest men and set out again in one of those long-boats on a patch of sea. In order to save his crew, he knew he needed to get away from Antarctica, and cross the angriest ocean on the planet, the Southern Ocean, to get word out and have at least a chance.
The four of them rocked and rolled on unbelievably heavy seas in a 20' open long-boat---basically a glorified canoe. And they eventually landed on a small island near South America, were picked up by a larger vessel, went to Argentina, got supplies and another ship, and went back for the crew members that were left behind.
They found them, and saved them.
Ernest Shackleton did not lose a single man from his floe-crushed ship Endurance. They spent months surviving and waiting, and Cap'n came back.
If four guys riding sixty-foot waves of stormy frigid ocean for 850 miles in twenty-foot long open canoes doesn't get your excitement meter running, then you should stop snorting meth from bony hooker asscracks.
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